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100It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.
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100Hauntingly tells a story older than the Odyssey and as timely as today's body count from Iraq.
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100Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.
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100Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."
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91This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.
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91A unique and masterful film, filled with surprises and felicities and moments of transporting visual power.
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90The film is near perfect in its attempt to properly mix the irrationality of war in with an interesting love story.
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90The holiday season's best movie so far.
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90When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.
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90Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.
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90Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.
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90In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."
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88An emotional powerhouse.
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88Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.
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88A long movie that almost wears out its 21/4-hour welcome, yet it's full of surprises.
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88Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.
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88An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.
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Jeunet provides numerous pleasures, particularly visual, along the way.
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80Inventive and lyrical, A Very Long Engagement is a joyous contradiction in terms: a war-torn romantic comedy.
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80A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.
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80The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.
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75Longer than necessary, that is, for the story it has to tell. This flaw aside, the drama is well crafted and sometimes touching, with especially forceful opening scenes.
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75There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.
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75It's an odd, initially jarring mixture of style and subject matter that works better as the film goes along.
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75A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.
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75Starts slowly, but builds to a satisfying conclusion.
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75Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.
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75The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.
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70The film is a trifle long too long for its rather slim mystery, but in face of so much beauty and invention that's a small quibble.
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70Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.
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63It's just exhausting. For all of the movie's sumptuous, eyepopping craft, you'll feel more than a little relief when Mathilde finally reaches the end of her quest.
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60For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.
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60Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
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60Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.
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60Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.
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60Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.
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50The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.
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50Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.
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The result is nothing but allusive and memorial. And boring. This film is boring, at least partly because it is trying desperately to be big.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 23 out of 27
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Mixed: 3 out of 27
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Negative: 1 out of 27
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BertiP.10
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TonyB.6